Different bloggers will be posting some musings, questions we're pondering, and maybe some announcements related to the philosophical community at Bethel University. Responses are encouraged, whether you're directly connected to Bethel or not. And be sure to like our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/bethelphilosophy

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Another contribution from Bethel and UW-Milwaukee graduate John Grandits.The last post, about lying to your children by telling them
about Santa Claus and the Elf on the Shelf, raises the question of child
education in general: what should we teach our children? Take a common topic
that has some parallels with Santa: what should we teach our children about
God? David Johnson thinks Santa and God share some
characteristics, although he
doesn't mention which ones. Some atheists argue that we shouldn't believe that
God exists for the same reasons we don't believe that Santa exists. That seems
false to me, but you don't have to think it's false to think that it's an open
question whether one should teach his children to believe/not believe that God
exists. What are the criteria?

David Johnson mentions some. For instance, don't lie to your children unless
there is some overriding/noble reason to. Certainly those who believe/don't
believe that God exists wouldn't be lying to their children if they told them
that God exists/doesn't exist.

But might there be a related criterion that says something like,
"Don't tell your children that P unless you have good reasons that P"?
And what if you believe you have good reasons for believing that P, but there
is still reasonable disagreement about P – as in the case of belief in God?
Does your child have a legitimate complaint against you if she, upon growing
up, comes to disagree with you about P when you always told her that P? She
might say something like, "You had no (epistemic) right to tell me that P
because there isn't much evidence in support of P. And even if you believed
that there was such support, you should have realized that this was a matter
about which one could reasonably disagree."

All of this leaves me wondering: shouldn't we teach our children as if they
were, say, students in a college classroom? Views about college teaching certainly
differ, but whatever our view is, shouldn't that just be our view about
teaching our own children? Or is there something about them (e.g. our relation
to them as parents) that makes this not the case?

Monday, December 15, 2014

Anyone who tells a child (or anyone else) that Santa exists
is doing wrong, according to Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).After all, to do so is to lie, and lying violates the Categorical
Imperative, the fundamental moral rule that governs all actions by rational
agents.

Here’s a brief summary of one version of the Categorical
Imperative.(I’m borrowing the explanation from James
Rachels’ book The Elements of Moral
Philosophy, which provides an excellent introduction to ethical theory.) The Categorical Imperative says that you must
always act in such a way that you can will that the rule you are following be
adopted universally – i.e. that everyone always follow it.

But you cannot tell a lie and will that
everyone always lie.After all, lies
wouldn’t work if everyone always lied.(It’s hard to imagine what would
happen if everyone always lied – communication would be difficult, that’s for
sure!)The rule that everyone
always lie would be self-defeating. But
then you simply may not lie.And that includes telling children that there
is a Santa Claus.

If Kant would hate that particular lie, imagine what he’d
think about the Christmas toy, the “Elf on the Shelf.” This toy supposedly sits quietly on a shelf during the day and spies on the children, flies to the
North Pole at night to give Santa a report about their behavior, and returns
the next day to some other location in the house to spy some more.A whole bucketful of lies built into one toy!

Philosopher David Kyle Johnson from King’s College in
Pennsylvania argues persuasively in this blog post that we ought to refrain from
telling children that there is a Santa Claus and that a magical elf informs
Santa about how they are behaving.And perhaps
he’s right:perhaps we should strive to keep lying out of Christmas.